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Tuesday, 24 December 2013

Land Of The Dead

The key to a good zombie movie is
making it into a George A Romero zombie movie. The man who created the genre is
the icon and he is the trademark to the theme. Just like other Romero zombie films, his
standard of work levels to great story telling, beautiful gore and a showcase
of a brilliant journey of survival. Like most of Romero films there is always
something self-reflective on the perception of what would civilization might do
or become if zombies ever took over. In a world where the dead is going to or
already has taken over and now the humans are the minority. The real threat is
not the zombies but rather people. The key to a good post-apocalyptic genre is taking
humanity into extraordinary circumstances and creating a far greater threat
than the strange conditions of the surroundings. George always captures the human element of
pushing humanity to the brink of insanity. With this it is always the human
element that becomes the greatest threat for the survivors.

Land Of The Dead is set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where the
zombie infestation has overrun the living. Now the remaining surviving
population live in fenced and protected cities. An administration has now
become a self-styled government where the population is split between a ruling
class, led by the arrogant Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) and the underclass who
struggle in the streets. As our protagonist Riley Denbo (Simon Baker) is
looking to head north where there are no people or zombies, his second in
command Colo (John Leguizamo) looks to live in the ivory tower with the big
shots. However a deal between Cholo and Kaufman turns ugly, which results in
Cholo stealing a heavily armed zombie-fighting truck called “Dead Reckoning”
and demands his money or else he’ll blow up the corrupt city. Riley is sent to
stop Cholo and steal back the armoured truck but he has other plans.

The primary focus of Land Of The Dead is the films
distinction between the wealthy and the poor. When the rich live in the lavish
tower of Fiddler’s Green the poor live in the slums. This is Romero’s political
drive into the film that shows the rising gap between the rich and poor in the
United States and possibly the rest of the world. As poor get poorer and rich
get richer we begin to see a rising rebellion in the slums by the lower class.
Rather than creating a segregated social class based on wealth they would
overthrow the upper class and create a more mutual government to benefit
everyone. Seems that Romero created a social unrest and unease between the rich
and poor in Land Of The Dead, alluding
to the audience that if the zombies don’t take over, it seems that a civil war
will eventual occur.

One of the sub-focus of Land Of The Dead is the city and how it
tries to go on as if nothing has happened. That their city is the centre of the
world and beyond their electric fence and high walls is a world that does not exist.
The new government run by profiteers, bankers and stockholders has made the
city believe that nothing is happening outside of its borders. They profit from
capturing zombies and using them for amusement, gambling and target practice.
Riley dislikes the cold concrete artificiality and wants to live somewhere with
no high walls and electric fences. Rather than hunting down zombies and killing
them he sees them as just another predator. Rather than slaughtering them it’s
better to just accept them and try to move on. This empathetic characteristic
of Riley makes for a likeable protagonist and believable hero.

This is the fourth of Romero's six Living Dead movies with Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), Diary of the Dead (2007) and Survival of the Dead (2010). What makes Land Of The Dead so different from the rest is the production value. Like the others Romero prefers to use a tighter budget and smaller crew to work with. While the 1968 release is known to be classic and is usually the series favourite. Land Of The Dead’s fascinating insight into the apocalyptic world of segregated social class of capitalism VS socialism makes this dead movie my personal favourite of the series.